Kitty Ussher: I agree with my hon. Friend, and that is one of the reasons why last week's pre-Budget report included, I am delighted to say, an announcement of £130 million for our financial inclusion fund over the comprehensive spending review period. That is up from £120 million in the current period. The current fund has been used to pay for about 500 debt advisors across the country. I do not know about the situation in Norwich, but I am happy to look into it. We will decide how to spend the additional money by the end of the year. I would have thought that the availability of those funds would enable us to continue, if not increase, the provision of advice that is already available.

David Taylor: The raising of the inheritance tax thresholds have certainly been driven by a tripling of UK house prices in the past 10 years or so. Has the Chancellor seen this morning's international report suggesting that UK house prices are about 40 per cent. higher than they should be economically? Would any amendment be made to inheritance tax policy if house prices drifted down in the next few years, as some people suggest they will?

Angela Eagle: I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. In passing, I note that the National Skills Academy for Manufacturing was formally launched this year and that its head office is in the west midlands. One of the pilot areas for the train-to-gain technical level 3 skills in the workplace is also in the west midlands. Nearly 7,000 west midlands businesses have been engaged with 8,000 low-skilled employees to improve their basic skills.

Edward Miliband: My hon. Friend, who is a former Minister with responsibility for the voluntary sector, makes an important point. We want to use organisations such as the community foundation to help to distribute the money because of their local knowledge about what is needed. Also, we want to ensure—this is an issue for small organisations throughout the country—that the application process is not the bureaucratic and cumbersome process that many organisations complain about.
	We need to be honest in this debate. There is always a dilemma for Government between taking the risks of the streamlined process of applying for money—a risk that we should be taking—and the more bureaucratic monitoring processes that sometimes operate. In relation to the small grants programme, it is important that the money gets out quickly. We will help to ensure that that happens, and that it is distributed in the simplest way possible so that small organisations can access it.
	In addition to the allocation of resources—the following proposal was in the Opposition's submission in relation to these matters—we are making £50 million available to organisations such as the community foundation as an endowment. That will allow them to build up the resources that they can distribute in future years without having to come back to Government. It will also allow them to get money in from the private sector and other organisations in the community that might want to contribute. Community foundations do a fantastic job, and an independent source of money will make a difference to them.
	On the subject of what happens at local level, I want to deal with asset transfers from local authorities to small organisations. Issues of funding and stability of funding—three-year funding is important—are crucial to the health of small organisations. When I was Minister with responsibility for the third sector, I was struck by what asset transfer can do for local organisations. I visited the Goodwin centre in Hull, which has transformed part of the city because it was given an asset which gave it the financial stability that many third sector organisations do not have.
	We have made available £30 million to help to fund innovative projects in this area, but more work needs to be done. We need to encourage local authorities to see voluntary organisations not as the enemy, as they are sometimes seen, but as an ally in helping to improve local communities. Of course, people can raise issues of accountability when assets are transferred to community organisations, but projects such as the Goodwin centre in Hull shows how those issues can be dealt with. The people who run the centre are elected by the local neighbourhood.

Edward Miliband: My hon. Friend has made an important point. My hon. Friend the Member for Corby, who is the Minister with responsibility for the third sector, has said that he met the RDAs yesterday. We are making finance available to the RDAs to promote social enterprise, which is important.
	On the role that social enterprises can play, some of the most inspiring people whom I have met in the third sector work in social enterprises, large and small. I am thinking of Tim Smit who runs the Eden project, which is an extraordinary project that has done amazing things for Cornwall. I am also thinking about small social enterprises in my constituency that help disabled men and women and people with learning disabilities.
	The Government do not create inspiring social entrepreneurs, but we can help or hinder them. Part of the task for the Government is finding new ways of helping to finance social enterprise. That is why we are interested in the idea of a social investment bank, which would create a new stream of finance for social enterprise. That is also why £10 million is available to pioneer different ways in which social enterprises can be funded.
	Government needs to be a better customer of social enterprise. Again, that is partly about culture change—convincing those who commission services that social enterprises in areas such as recycling or waste management can compete with large private sector organisations and that the safe option is not necessarily always to go for the conventional option of a large private sector conglomerate. I am thinking of, for example, ECT, which provides recycling and waste services.

Edward Miliband: I agree with my hon. Friend, who makes an important point. There is an all-party commission on volunteering led by Baroness Julia Neuberger, and I hope that it will consider the issue that he has raised. Such secondments and the mixing of people from local authorities and the voluntary sector are the way to break down the barriers and suspicions I mentioned earlier.
	The fifth and final message from the review is about third sector organisations' ability to be advocates for social change. It is important to understand why that is important. Third sector organisations often speak up for those who have the least representation in our society. Examples from the past few years show what such organisations can achieve: the work of charities campaigning for respite care for disabled children; the efforts of such organisations as Carers UK to speak up for the rights of carers; and the achievements of Scope in changing attitudes and legislation on disability on behalf of disabled men and women. In recognition of such roles, the principle of advocacy and campaigning was set out in the compact established in 1998. However, the review found that many organisations—and I saw this myself—are deterred from advocating and campaigning.

Francis Maude: It is probably more than six years since I took part in a debate from this Dispatch Box, and the old cliché about one's opposite numbers looking younger as the years go by turns out to be true in this case.
	Until the last five minutes or so, I appreciated the measured and temperate tone in which the Minister opened the debate. These matters should not be the subject of intensely partisan debate, and for the most part they are not, as in his third sector review, with which Members in all parts of the House would agree. We do not need to describe such bipartisanship as treacle, exactly—honey, perhaps, I might say, without getting too cloying. It is important that these matters are properly discussed, and I am grateful that we are finally having this debate.
	It is a pity that the review was released if not under cover of darkness, then on the eve of the recess, through a written statement. That is not quite in tune with the pledges made by the Prime Minister when he took office. It may not be quite so groundbreaking a document, useful though some of it undoubtedly is, as that which was foreshadowed. It does not have the heft or depth of the report led by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith), "Breakthrough Britain", which is very detailed, substantive and well researched. One or two items in it are already finding their way into Government policy. As they are good ideas, we welcome that.
	Everyone pays lip service to the desirability of greater involvement of the voluntary sector in social action and social enterprise, but lots of questions are prompted by that bland statement. We are concerned about the independence of voluntary and third sector organisations from Government, as that independence should be a matter of crucial importance. It is inevitable that where an organisation is getting a significant part of its funding from the public sector, in one form of another, issues are sometimes raised about independence. None the less, independence is crucial. It is interesting that it is not until one reaches page 87 of this 100-page review that one finds any reference to third sector organisations being independent of control by the state, and even then, it is a hidden-away statement on regulation:
	"Organisations in the third sector are independent of control by the state or by any other external agent."
	Such organisations should be independent. That is important, because that independence is part of the basis on which they have the public's trust. We all value what they can achieve in social action, not only because they are often more efficient and therefore deliver more for the taxpayer's pound than direct Government provision, but principally because they tend to be closer to the people and communities that they aim to serve, and because they can be more directly and more immediately responsive to people's needs, more innovative and less constrained in what they do. Crucially, they are also more likely to be trusted by their users than are the organs of the state. We will come back to that point.
	The issue of independence is thus central to the effectiveness of the sector. There are broader philosophical arguments for independence to do with the dispersal of power and influence, and the vigour and vitality of civil society. We can explore those on another occasion. Our concerns about the erosion of the independence of voluntary sector organisations are serious. I would like to spend a moment on this.
	The review referred to the principles of the Compact:
	"The 1998 Compact on relations between Government and the Voluntary Sector in England, jointly published with the sector and the Compact Codes, provide a framework to guide partnership working between the state and the third sector...The Commissioner for the Compact is now taking forward the implementation of the Compact principles and will champion their dissemination and application across Government."
	The Compact principles are important.
	It was slightly ironic that just before the review containing those splendid words was published, both the chief executive of the Commission for the Compact and the commissioner resigned without any explanation. As far I know, those posts have not yet been filled, so it would be useful to hear some amplification about how the assertion that the Commission will take forward the application of the principles will be fulfilled. We also need some explanation of why, only a year after it was established, both its chief executive and the commissioner have departed. The departures are unexplained and some voluntary sector leaders, such as Debra Alcock Tyler of the Directory of Social Change, have expressed their dismay. She has said that
	"we have to wonder what's going on—it's actually very destabilising."
	Stephen Bubb, chief executive of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations—ACEVO—has been damning in his assessment of the effect of the Compact:
	"Many people in the voluntary sector are very strong supporters of the compact, but this is a 1997 document"
	—it is actually from 1998—
	"that has not been moved forward in any real tangible way."
	He also says:
	"I'm afraid to say there is a real problem with the level of cynicism among charity chief executives about the compact and how effective it can be. The number of charities that simply don't bother to use it is growing."
	It is significant that even the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, which has been the sector's leading advocate of the Compact approach, now appears to question its effectiveness. Its chief executive, Stuart Etherington, has said:
	"we need to seriously consider how we can strengthen the Compact. Is it time to consider the possibility of giving the Commissioner formal legal powers to make adjudication stick? Or to identify appropriate sanctions for those that don't comply?"
	In reality, the principles of the Compact, which are important, are, in far too many cases, simply being ignored; they are honoured much more in the breach than in the observance. Full cost recovery, prompt payment and multi-year funding, all issues that have been raised in this debate, are simply not happening on anything like the scale envisaged. The dependence of third sector organisations on the state has increased rather than lessened, through the increased use of contracts rather than grants, with strict constraints on what can be done with the money—quite apart from the absence of the positive sides of the compact. That increase reflects a mindset that sees using the third sector as a means of outsourcing Government activities rather than as empowering people to find different and better ways of helping people and communities.
	On the funding announcements in the third sector review, the starting point must be a recognition of the hit that the sector has already suffered at the hands of this Government. In the Prime Minister's last Budget as Chancellor alone, the rate of gift aid tax relief was cut from 28p to 25p in the pound, a cut of more than 10 per cent.—the annual cost to charities is in excess of £70 million. Characteristically, that was not a change mentioned by the then Chancellor in his speech, nor did it appear in the Red Book—it was in the fine print; as so often, the bad news was hidden away. It was also not in the Treasury's Budget notes, nor was it mentioned by the Minister who was then responsible for the third sector or in any Office of the Third Sector communication.

Francis Maude: If I may paraphrase what my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) said yesterday, if the hon. Gentleman wants to discuss our policies, let us have the election and let the manifesto that the Minister has been slaving away trying to write be published. We will then have the debate and let the people choose. If that is what the hon. Gentleman wants, bring it on.
	The change that I referred to has been made, with the resulting £70 million hit to the charitable sector, and that is on top of the effect of the abolition of tax credits on investment income, which costs charities about £250 million a year. That figure does not even include the cost of abolishing tax credits for voluntary sector bodies that do not have charitable status, which were not even covered by the transitional relief arrangements. Against that background, the £80 million small grants programme looks like thin gruel.
	A report from the Directory of Social Change highlights the importance of serious, stable grant funding:
	"We believe that as part of enabling the voluntary sector to flourish, and trusting it to do its work effectively, government needs to provide more unrestricted funding through non-prescriptive programmes, especially at local level."
	It goes on to warn that exactly the opposite is happening:
	"Sadly, the reverse seems to be the trend at the moment—funding programmes are becoming exceedingly prescriptive and more rationalised into larger pots for 'strategic' relationships with fewer larger organisations operating at a national level... many small local grant programmes are being phased out, and it is unclear how local voluntary activity and representation will be included and funded as part of Local Area Agreements—there is a real risk that these will lead to less involvement for voluntary sector organisations at the local level as well."
	Even where grant programmes survive, they are failing to deliver stable funding for voluntary groups. According to the Charity Commission more than two thirds of all funding agreements were for one year or less, and fewer than a quarter were for more than two years. The Government are failing to deliver on their promise of extending the funding. We support that promise and I think that it would engage support across the House.
	Another obvious part of the background to funding decisions is the effect of the raid on the lottery. The first raid on the lottery for the Olympics was announced in June 2006 and removed £410 million from the lottery good causes, including £213 million from the Big Lottery Fund. Then they came round again in March to take another £675 million out of the lottery good causes. According to the Minister, the funding settlement
	"protects both existing programmes and future resources for the voluntary sector."
	That is a bit disingenuous, because the protection applies only to the funding that voluntary organisations get from the Big Lottery Fund. The funding that the voluntary sector gets from other lottery distributors, such as the Heritage Lottery Fund, Arts Council England and Sport England, will not be exempt from the second Olympic raid. According to the NCVO, cultural, sporting and heritage charities will lose more than £100 million as a result.
	On the issue of public service provision, concern has been expressed in many parts of the sector about monopoly commissioning. Everyone is now in favour of diversity of provision, and monopoly commissioning is a concern. A look at offender management services and employment services illustrates that concern.
	The centralised management of many public services means that commissioning decisions are taken a long way away from the local contexts in which voluntary sector providers are often best able to demonstrate their strengths. Another disadvantage of centralisation is that services tend to be commissioned on a national or regional basis, effectively excluding medium-sized and smaller voluntary sector organisations which lack the immediate capacity to take on contracts of that size.
	There is also a tendency for centralised commissioning to generate a "we know best" attitude from the state, specifying in excessive detail not only what services should be delivered, but how they should be delivered. That tendency to be over-prescriptive is a problem across the procurement of services in much of the public sector and it severely limits the scope for innovation and diversity, which is often the best reason for involving voluntary organisations in the first place.
	By opening up the delivery of public services, but not the commissioning side, the Government are programming a clash of cultures into the system. As long as top-down control systems are the norm, public sector managers will attempt to conduct their relationship with voluntary sector providers according to the same rules to which they themselves are subject. There are no easy answers as this is very complex territory, but I urge the Minister to look further at the issue.
	The saga of the way in which the Department of Work and Pensions has treated voluntary sector bidders for contracts under the pathways to work scheme is illustrative. The tendering process for phase 1 of the scheme was aborted less than three hours before the original deadline for tenders in February, as a result of the Government revising the specifications at the shortest of notice. A new deadline was set for 25 April, requiring significant additional resources to be devoted by the bidders. When the results of phase 1 were announced, only two of the 16 regional contracts went to the voluntary sector, both to the same charity, which is the largest in the employment services field.
	Stephen Bubb of ACEVO—up to that point a strong supporter of the Government's approach—said that the voluntary sector had been
	"comprehensively stuffed"
	by the DWP's procurement practices. He added:
	"There is huge anger in the sector with what seems to be serious problems with the process. This is a natural area for the talents of the third sector. We have been doing some brilliant work and it is implausible that hasn't come through in the tendering process. The Government has said it wants the sector to play a bigger role in delivering public services, but there is a huge gap between that rhetoric and reality."
	Many employment charities that had been delivering services to the long-term unemployed will now be reduced to the status of sub-contractors to the private sector firms running the main contracts. That will significantly reduce the margin on the services they provide, threatening their financial viability.
	Another example is the Offender Management Act 2007, which will centralise the commissioning of probation services. We opposed that Bill, which made the Minister abandon his usual efforts to be non-partisan and throw around accusations of betrayal:
	"The Tories had a chance to show they mean their warm words about the role of the sector. Instead, they betrayed those words and opted for opportunism."
	There are shades of "his master's voice" in those remarks. However, it was clear just who was betraying whom when a coalition of charities working with offenders was formed to oppose the centralising provisions of the Offender Management Act. Members of the coalition include the Prison Reform Trust, The Prince's Trust and Crime Concern. A spokesman for the Prison Reform Trust highlighted the threat to small charities:
	"It's one thing to go after a vibrant, mixed economy, it's another to structure it in such a way that only certain people can compete...Regional commissioning is appropriate for some services, but the bulk of work is very local in nature and anything that would risk squeezing out the small charities and community groups has to be guarded against."
	There is a simple, broad point here. New Labour has from its outset had an extraordinarily centralising and controlling approach to government. Any idea that that approach might change with the new Prime Minister would have been incredible to any seasoned observer, as it was always clear that he was the big clunking centraliser at the core of new Labour. It was always certain that once he got his hands on the job that he had craved for so long, those tendencies would be wholly unconstrained. I have always thought that his approach was summed up by the worst of all phrases from the new Labour lexicon—"earned autonomy". When translated, that means, "You can do whatever you like, as long as we agree with it. You have no real autonomy or freedom, and you are always on the end of a lead, with master ready to twitch the string at the least sign of independence." That is why so much of the Government's language on the third sector does not ring true.
	It is in the nature of the third sector that it should be diverse, dispersed, vigorously independent and capable of innovation. A voluntary organisation's strength is its closeness to its service users and its ability to provide a much more personal, responsive, differentiated, flexible and swift service than the traditional organs of the state. That independence, the allowing of which requires trust and optimism from the Government, is key. But I am afraid that it is and has been under threat from, or has been eroded by, the Government.
	Parallel to that is another development, to which the Minister devoted a little time. One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to find it a bit sinister. It is the orchestrated campaign, which occupies several pages in the review, to widen significantly the ability of charities to undertake campaigning, both political and otherwise. The Minister tried, in a very unsophisticated way for someone whose intelligence and integrity I respect, to make out that our approach is that charities should not do any campaigning at all. That is absolute nonsense. We think that the law as it stands is very sensible. It allows campaigning if it is an ancillary activity. The Minister is suggesting that it should be allowed to be the dominant— [ Interruption. ] Well, he pretty much did suggest that. We will check  Hansard, but my recollection is that he did say that. He ruled out campaigning as the exclusive activity of a charity, but he did not rule out its being the dominant activity. That would change the law, because the case law clearly says that charities can campaign, but not to the extent that that is their dominant activity. This is well-trammelled territory. The Charity Commission, no doubt completely spontaneously, has revised its guidance twice already, in a way that it says will broaden the scope for such campaigning. It is currently consulting—again, no doubt completely spontaneously—on a third such redraft.
	The review published by the Minister quotes a report of Baroness Helena Kennedy's advisory committee. By a curious circularity, that report quotes the Minister himself, who said:
	"It is massively in the interest of politicians to champion your"—
	that is, the third sector's—"campaigning role".
	That quotation was not quite accurate, as diligent research by my hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) managed to elucidate. There were no dots appearing to show an excision in the quotation, but what the Minister actually said was:
	"it is massively in the interests of progressive politicians to champion your campaigning role."
	I consider myself to be a progressive politician, and I consider my party to be a progressive party, but I wonder whether that is what the Minister had in mind when he used the phrase "progressive politicians". Perhaps he would care to help me out on this. He is maintaining an uncharacteristic silence.
	This is a curious development. In the review, all of it was presented in the most anodyne way. However, it should be clear that the proposal is enormously controversial, for two reasons. First, political and party funding, and therefore campaigning, is the subject of continuing discussion between the parties under Sir Hayden Phillips' chairmanship. We read in this Monday's edition of  The  Independent of the Government's intention to introduce unilaterally legislation that would restrict what political parties can spend on political campaigning, out of money that has been raised voluntarily from the public. This would inhibit the ability of political parties to engage in political campaigning, which is what they exist to do; it is their raison d'être. Incidentally, it was interesting that we read about that proposal in the newspapers—so much for the Prime Minister's much-vaunted undertaking that there would be no spin and briefing in newspapers, and that any proposals would be announced in the House of Commons, rather than spun in the newspapers.
	We know that the proposal arises from the Labour Party's own financial difficulties; but none the less, that sort of proposal has enormous general implications for a democracy. At the same time as the Government are planning to restrict what parties can do by way of political campaigning, they are also explicitly planning to expand what charities can do by way of political campaigning. It may be completely coincidental that both of those things are going on at the same time, but it is a remarkable coincidence.

Norman Baker: The Minister will have a further opportunity to deal with that particular point and that quote at the end. My understanding is that it is perfectly possible to be highly political—on an issue such as hunting, for example, which strongly divided the House— without being party political. That is a key difference for me, suggesting where voluntary organisations should go in this respect. In my view, they cross the line if they come out and say, "We believe in this policy, so you should vote for this political party". That would be quite wrong, but saying, "We believe in this policy" is entirely appropriate. I do not see the problem there.
	I want to raise another issue about campaigning, as it is a barrier that needs to be dealt with. I have already mentioned my RSPCA role and I should also mention that I am president of the Tibet Society. In that role, I have become aware that a great deal of unnecessary bureaucracy has been forced on it as a consequence of its concerns about the Charity Commission and what it is able to do without being rapped over the knuckles. The same applies to Greenpeace and other organisations. The Tibet Society has had to separate itself into two parts. There is the Tibet relief fund, which campaigns in a completely non-political way—in terms of the categories of the right hon. Member for Horsham—to provide sustenance and support for the Tibetan community in exile in India and elsewhere. Then there is the Tibet Society, which might be regarded as having a more political role in arguing about the Chinese occupation—an illegal occupation—of Tibet. Because of concerns about how that might be interpreted, a dual structure has been created within the society to ensure that no rules are broken. I have to say that all this is unnecessarily bureaucratic. It costs money and it gets in the way of spending the money that has been raised for the Tibetans. Resources are being spent artificially to meet what may be unfounded concerns about how the Charity Commission might respond to the society's work. I very much hope that, as a consequence of the review, that sort of unnecessary distinction, which costs time and money to voluntary organisations, can be dispensed with. I would therefore go in the opposite direction to the right hon. Member for Horsham in that regard.
	Let me briefly mention a small, technical point about how the Government are dealing with the third sector. Given that some 70 per cent. of moneys available to voluntary community organisations come from the local level and that these organisations are not national statutory bodies, there is an argument for the Department for Communities and Local Government rather than the Cabinet Office to deal with the third sector. There may be a case for the Cabinet Office carrying out a one-off review of the third sector, but I am not personally convinced that the Cabinet Office is the correct location within the Government to carry out such a function. It would fit much better with the DCLG. There are problems with the Compact and with the delivery of good works on the ground. We know that the Compact is not being honoured by all local councils. It would be easier to deal with those problems if the function were situated in DCLG rather than the Cabinet Office. I will not lose any sleep if it stays where it is, but I wanted to argue the point in this debate.
	The right hon. Member for Horsham raised the issue of the Commission for the Compact. I am not aware of the history either, but it seems unfortunate to lose Angela Simpson and then John Stoker. As has been put to me this week, it can be unfortunate to lose one leader, but losing two looks like something else! Perhaps the Minister will respond not on the diversion that I have just suggested, but on the Compact commission. Seriously, we need to know what happened and we want some assurance that any problems will be sorted out. We must have confidence in the future direction of that body. I would also be interested to know whether the Minister sees it as having a different function or moving in a different direction from how it has been viewed up to now.
	Finally, I want to say a little more on the social enterprise side of the issue, which the Minister mentioned in his contribution. I agree with him that it is a very important aspect of the third sector. He mentioned the Eden Project. As he may know, the social enterprise coalition would like some clarification from the office of the third sector as to what it is doing to ensure that the distinctive business needs of social enterprises are represented in the Government's enterprise strategy and framework. There seems to be some uncertainty about that, so it would be helpful if the Minister dealt with the point when he sums up.
	For some time we have had a "green Ministers" Committee, an official Cabinet Committee, which has looked into the Government's policies across government from an environmental point of view. I believe that it has been useful in identifying good practice and eliminating bad practice. It would be nice if the ethos of social enterprise organisations and businesses could be rolled out across government in order to achieve best practice in Government Departments. It could improve their dealings with Cafédirect, for example. I am not convinced that there is the same cross-government commitment to support that ethos and such social organisations as there now is to support good environmental practice. The Minister might address that point.
	In general terms, however, the Government appear to be on the right track. As someone who criticises the Government not infrequently, I feel that it is important to say when they have got things right, and I think that they have, by and large, got them right so far in this regard. However, I am willing to be proved wrong in due course by the right hon. Member for Horsham.

Charlotte Atkins: Even if that were true, it would still leave the figure at £650 million, as opposed to £100 million in 1997. Since 2004, more than £350 million has also been invested in the sector to respond to people's needs through specific programmes. However, I accept the points made earlier that we need to do much more about continual core funding—not just start-up funding—for voluntary organisations. For example, as I think the hon. Member for Lewes (Norman Baker) mentioned, citizens advice bureaux in particular are having problems—certainly mine in Biddulph is—with not having sufficient core funding. It provides an excellent service and gets money for particular projects, but it still needs its key work force funded to keep the advice centre going.
	The voice of the third sector certainly needs to be heard in order to help change our society for the better. The real test of how well the voluntary sector is working is to take a look at a community and judge how much poorer it would be without the voluntary sector. In Staffordshire, Moorlands—a relatively rural constituency—that would involve first sweeping away all the advice agencies that are so important—Age Concern, the CAB, the Biddulph resource and information centre—and getting rid of the wide range of services, such as voluntary transport, support and expertise, within the Staffordshire, Moorlands community and voluntary services office. They all do an amazing job.
	However, I want to focus on the Biddulph resource and information centre—BRIC, as it is known. It is run by Sylvia Rushton, Biddulph's neighbourhood agent, and her volunteers. They provide a friendly drop-in advice and support centre for the most deprived community in my constituency. BRIC also offers a community café, providing a home-cooked, nutritious meal for just £3.25. I met a gentleman there only last week, and it was clearly a lifeline for him; he lives alone, and the staff there not only provide his lunch for him, but they give him a sandwich for his tea as well. BRIC also gives computer access to deprived families and computer training, and it is even moving into the provision of furniture as it responds to the needs of the local community.
	Ten miles away in Leek, the Haregate community centre is located on an estate that used to be seen as run-down and rough. That is no longer the case. The local voluntary services have supported residents in running the centre and have helped to develop community pride through such events as local galas, projects to regenerate the recreation ground with equipment, and the planting of shrubs and bulbs, which the community has got involved in. The centre brings the generations together, from the highly successful Sure Start for the early years to music and movement for the over-60s and much more besides.
	The Sure Start project, for which I won funding, has transformed lives. I have seen insecure mums with their young children arrive barely having the confidence to turn up. Then they have got involved as volunteers, and before long they start accessing courses and developing skills, which boosts confidence and opens up their prospects. That is good news for the whole family, as aspirations are raised and the children thrive.
	Voluntary organisations and charities are central to creating a healthy, vibrant and cohesive society. Two such projects among the many in my constituency are particularly worth a mention. The Honeycomb centre is situated in the delightful village of Longnor. It is a social enterprise and work development centre for people with education disabilities, producing quality garden furniture and craft goods. It works in partnership with Leek college, helping to break down barriers to employment by providing real work for disadvantaged young people in Staffordshire, Moorlands. It recently won an environmental quality mark for using locally sourced Peak District national park timber for its bird tables and rustic benches. So successful has it been in supplying schools and businesses with its products that it has needed a £20,000 extension to accommodate its increasing capacity needs.
	The Bridlegate project is located at the mill on the river Hamps at Winkhill near Leek. It is a rural project that accepts students to work with farm animals and on conservation and environmental challenges so that they can build self-confidence and skills and move on to mainstream further education, sheltered employment or volunteering placements. Both projects do a remarkable job on a shoestring, and I congratulate both Ken Weston and Kath Riley who run the projects alongside volunteers.
	I welcome the focus in the third sector review final report on the sector's role in campaigning, as it is an important way of providing a voice, particularly to disadvantaged groups. Sometimes it would be much more convenient for local authorities and Government if voluntary organisations did not campaign. They can make life very uncomfortable for elected representatives, but they should not be dismissed as "the usual suspects". Instead, they should be supported as community champions. Nationally, Every Disabled Child Matters has done an amazing job in raising the profile of disability issues and winning Government support for, among other things, vital family respite care.

Charles Walker: It is a great privilege to speak in this review of the third sector. I promise the House that in my brief contribution, I shall not stray into anything that could be deemed to be partisan. I am sure that I shall be pulled up if I do.
	The UK's charitable sector is one of this country's great successes. All of us, wherever we are from, have the right to be deeply proud of it. There is something very British about charities, which do a fabulous job. As the hon. Member for Staffordshire, Moorlands (Charlotte Atkins) so eloquently made clear, they give people an opportunity to engage with their local communities, and they also provide an opportunity for people to engage with the wider world.
	I shall not detain the House, but I want to relate a brief family anecdote. My young son was recently part of a team of 196 people who took part in the great north run. Being nine years old, he ran only the two-mile stretch, but the aim of the group as a whole was to raise to money for something called Vicky's Water Project, in memory of 28-year old Vicky Buchanan, who, tragically, was killed last year. They were running collectively to raise money on behalf of ActionAid to support the creation of several clean water projects in Ethiopia, which will save many thousands of lives over the next 50 or 100 years. Between them, the young people—actually, they were not all young; some were as old as 76—raised £403,000. People ask how they can go beyond their community to play their part as global citizens to help the wider world, so it is fantastic that we have charities such as ActionAid and Christian Aid that enable such things to happen.
	Locally in Broxbourne, we have the good charity Millennium Volunteers. If I am not mistaken, I think that the Government had something to do with setting it up. I get involved in many of its projects, and it does fabulous work throughout my constituency all year round. We also have Groundwork. The hon. Member for Staffordshire, Moorlands talked about getting businesses involved in charity, and Groundwork brings together businesses for team-building days and puts them out in the community doing good work in deprived areas, which is to be hugely welcomed. The charitable sector is a great success story for this country, and I hope that it has a long, prosperous and bright future ahead of it.
	I question some of the figures relating to volunteers. Like all hon. Members in the Chamber, I spend a lot of time visiting local charities and attending their annual general meetings. It seems to me that the same people often carry out similar roles for different charities, and double or triple up their roles. People who lead charities say that over the past 10 or 20 years, as people have become busier or had different calls on their time, it has become more difficult to recruit volunteers. I hope that Ministers and our Front Benchers—and we in Parliament collectively—can address that situation and ensure that volunteering remains something that people want to do.
	The Public Administration Committee, of which I am a member, has been examining the delivery of services in the public sector by charities. I understand why the Government would like to involve charities in the delivery of public sector services because it might represent an attractive new model of delivery. No doubt many charities are already doing an excellent job of delivering public services, and those that will be brought into the fold will also do so. However, I would like to focus on some possible downsides. This is not a criticism, but a genuine set of concerns.
	There is a danger that a form of corporatisation or nationalisation of charities will rob them of the very essence of what makes them so special. A number of charities, many of which are doing a fantastic job, receive more than 90 per cent. of their income stream from local or national Government. The excellent charity Turning Point readily admitted to the Select Committee that 95 per cent. of its funding came from the Government. One must thus question whether it is still a charity, or whether it has more of the characteristics of a corporate organisation. Such concerns are legitimate because the Charity Commission discovered through research last year that 40 per cent. of charities delivering public sector services did not have a complaints procedure. That is worrying and needs to be addressed, because I know that companies delivering services to the public sector must have a complaints procedure so that people can escalate and feed back their concerns.
	I am troubled and slightly concerned that large national charities, with their economies of scale, can squeeze out good local providers that are very much in tune with the needs of their local communities. That is particularly true for the charities in my constituency that deal with alcohol and drug abuse. We have two very good niche charities, Chrysalis and Vale House. They take very different approaches to managing substance abuse, but both provide an excellent service. My concern centres on the fact that when contracts to deal with, say, substance abuse are tendered on a countywide basis, small charities do not have the scope, coverage or expertise to bid for them.

Mark Lazarowicz: I am delighted to have the opportunity to make a few comments in this afternoon's important debate, not least because, by the end of our discussion, a total of five Labour and Co-operative Members will have either spoken or intervened. That is no accident because those of us who come from the Co-operative as well as the Labour tradition have at the heart of our political philosophy the Co-operative ideal of self-help and communities working together to address the needs of their society and area. It is therefore unsurprising that we have an interest in how to extend community self-help, which is behind the thinking in the review.
	Like, I am sure, all hon. Members, I am fortunate in having a wide range of campaigning and non-governmental organisations—charities and non-charities—active in my constituency. The headquarters of large, campaigning NGOs, such as Friends of the Earth Scotland, is in my constituency. The headquarters of organisations that provide valuable support to charities and NGOs on the ground are also based my area. They include Citizens Advice Scotland and the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations. I believe that all their staff are full time, but their work assists tens of thousands of volunteers who work in communities in Scotland. To echo a point that was made earlier, it is dangerous to pick out the number of full-time staff in organisations because that does not always take due account of the work of those organisations.
	Hon. Members may have noticed that I am wearing in my lapel a poppy from the Poppyscotland appeal, which was launched yesterday in the Scotland Office in Dover house. I am fortunate to have the Poppyscotland headquarters and its poppy factory in my constituency.
	That is just a snapshot of some of the headquarters and national organisations that are based in my constituency. I would not even dream of picking out too many local organisations, for fear, apart from anything else, of perhaps offending those that I did not mention. Like all of us, if I were to list the local organisations active in my constituency, we would be here well beyond the 6 o'clock deadline and probably well into tomorrow. I once tried to count how many people were involved in local activity in the third sector in my constituency. I estimated the figure to be certainly well over 10,000, and probably 20,000, with 1,000 to 1,500 organisations, illustrating how much the work of community organisations and the third sector is at the heart of community life and society in all our constituencies.
	Community organisations provide a vital role, as all hon. Members know, not just in delivering community services and assisting in their provision, but in giving voice to communities defined by both geography and interest. In many cases, community organisations also help to re-establish some of the basic social bonds that have broken down or to build those bonds that have never been established in the first place. Such organisations play a vital role, and I am sure that we have all experienced that in our constituencies.
	Many of the policy areas affecting the third sector in Scotland are devolved. I will not take up the House's time by talking in detail about issues that do not fall within the responsibility of the Minister and the UK Government. There are, however, a number of important areas in which what the Government have done is of great benefit to third sector organisations in my constituency, just as I am sure it will be to organisations in the constituency of the hon. Member for Caernarfon (Hywel Williams) and hon. Members from other constituencies outside England.
	Mention has been made of gift aid. Unlike the right hon. Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude), I continue to believe that gift aid is a wonderful support for charities. Without that innovation, introduced by the Government, many charities would not be able to do the kind of work that they do. I pay tribute to what has already been achieved not only by gift aid, but in trying to respond to the concerns raised by charities about how gift aid schemes operate.
	I was intrigued by the suggestion that the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker) made to make it even simpler for charities to make use of the gift aid regime. I saw the Minister nodding away enthusiastically when the suggestion was made. I am not sure how far his nodding was a commitment on behalf of the Government—perhaps he is not nodding now; I do not know—but the suggestion was certainly interesting. I suspect that it would probably be of particular benefit to small charities that have not started to make use of gift aid, perhaps because they feel that any bureaucracy is too much extra work to bear, so I hope that the Minister will take up that suggestion.

Greg Clark: Absolutely—multi-partisanship, not bi-partisanship. However, that is not surprising, because the Minister is a genial man, as we know. He has a sympathetic ear and a reassuring tongue, but we sometimes wonder whether his elbows are quite sharp enough in engaging in his job. It almost seems impolite to mention the performance of the office of the third sector, but I am not sure that it quite lives up to the billing and reputation that he enjoys personally.
	The office of the third sector, which was a Conservative idea, was set up to be a strong voice and an advocate of the third sector right across government. Now that it exists, however, it is a meek organisation that is too often ignored. In June this year, the National Audit Office condemned the "baroque complexity" of the present funding arrangements for the public sector. The office of the third sector agreed that that description was a fair assessment of the regime over which it presides. If we look at the compact—the key bulwark that exists to protect the sector and provide a Government guarantee of fair treatment—we see that it is in meltdown, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude) said. The chief executive resigned in June, and the commissioner resigned in September.
	The further one goes from the Minister's office, the more widely the compact is ignored. One chief executive of a charity told me that a major public service commissioner had physically torn up the Compact in front of her to illustrate the degree of respect that he had for it. The compact is toothless, spineless and, as we have heard, increasingly useless when it comes to protecting local charities on the ground. What is the Minister doing about that? The purpose of the office of the third sector is to be strong, to bully people and to bang heads together. It has some way to go before it achieves that. The hon. Member for Edinburgh, North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz) complained about a three-year funding contract that was taken away after a single year. That is precisely the kind of situation that the office of the third sector was designed to act on.
	Let us consider the components involved. Full cost recovery is not a new idea. It was a binding commitment in the 2002 Treasury review, on which I assume the Minister was an adviser before he came into the House. We were promised that all Government contracts would be let on the basis of full cost recovery by 2006. According to the Charity Commission, however, last year only 12 per cent. of charities reported achieving full cost recovery all the time, and 43 per cent. said that they never achieved it. Another key component is long-term contracts. The 2002 Treasury review again promised stable funding, but the Charity Commission says that two thirds of funding contracts are for one year or less.
	The office of the third sector is punching below its weight in seeking to make a difference to the culture around the country. It has no clout with its neighbours. Community Service Volunteers was owed £3.7 million by the Department of Health for a contract. It complained to the Minister, but that had no effect; it had to go to the newspapers to make a difference.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham also mentioned the Department for Work and Pensions' pathways to work programme. The office of the third sector exists to protect the interests of the voluntary sector, but only this year we have seen aborted contracting processes costing charities tens of thousands of pounds. Stephen Bubb, who is a self-confessed mate of the Minister, says that the voluntary sector has been "comprehensively stuffed". If even the Minister's mates are telling him that he is not standing up for them, what hope have we?
	I was concerned that a number of Labour Members wanted the Minister to visit their constituencies—as if that would make a difference. I have been looking at the written evidence submitted to the Public Administration Committee's hearing on this matter, and I think that those Members should think twice before issuing such an invitation. The memorandum submitted by Women's Health in South Tyneside states:
	"We have entered into contracts through the LSC for the training aspects of our work and we are buckling with the bureaucratic demands this places upon us...I would like to add that this organisation which was visited recently by the Minister for the Third sector...has recently had 2 substantial funding streams removed at short notice."
	So much for his attention to the interests of the sector!
	We need to see a more robust performance from the office of the third sector. Warm words are not enough. One would think that the Minister, of all people, would have the ear of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, now the Prime Minister, yet we know that £70 million was lost to the third sector at a stroke in the Budget, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham pointed out earlier. There was no mention of it in the Budget statement or in any press release. The Budget was carefully constructed to protect all, or most, of the losers from the consequences, but the one group of people that got no protection at all was the third sector, which the office is supposed to represent.
	The office of the third sector has influence without achievement, and we need to improve on that. We had the first Olympic raid, totalling £213 million, in June 2006. The second raid involved the loss of £675 million, £100 million of which was from the charities that the Minister has pledged to protect. The Minister says that grants are important, but as a proportion of the sector's funding, they have fallen from 52 per cent. to 38 per cent.
	When it comes to campaigning, the Minister for the Cabinet Office is keen to align himself with the advisory group. I would like further clarification, but he seems to have engaged in something of a climbdown this afternoon.

Greg Clark: It is impossible to know what the Minister has agreed to; I would like to hear from him. It is clear in the review, as I have already pointed out, that the Government have no objection to charities being "wholly or mainly" engaged in political activities. Today, the Minister says that they cannot be "wholly" political, so I would like to know whether they can be "mainly" political. We would all like to know that. What we do know is that the Minister is putting pressure on the Charity Commission to change its definition. We would like to know more about that pressure.
	As I said, the Minister is wrong to associate himself too closely with the review. Baroness Kennedy states that the consequence of not going in this direction is that
	"charities will be pushed into a tiny area of traditional paternalistic or benevolent assistance".
	What a patronising view that report takes of the contribution of the charity sector! Does the advisory group really dismiss anything beyond campaigning as being "tiny" in its impact or "paternalistic"—a term used pejoratively in that context? If that is the company that the right hon. Gentleman is keeping on this matter, we are right to be concerned about his intentions. He should think more carefully before entering into this territory. He trucks with charities at his peril. As the Baroness rightly said, they enjoy a high level of public trust, much greater than that of political parties, so the last thing that we politicians should do is to undermine the confidence of donors in the charities themselves.
	Let me deal with some of today's speeches. We have heard some good and robust ones. The hon. Member for City of Chester (Christine Russell), in a cheery and upbeat speech, talked about the extent of voluntary activity in Cheshire. Such activity is typical in all our constituencies. It is constantly amazing how varied and diverse voluntary activity is. The hon. Lady mentioned that she will be in her local charity shop, supporting it to the best of her ability. I am sure that we will all find opportunities to volunteer on "make a difference day".
	The hon. Member for Lewes (Norman Baker) is impressive in his reading material, as I see that he scrutinises  Whitehall & Westminster World. His point about the independence of the sector is key. In a world where there is more contracting with the Government, which I think is a good thing, it is especially important for charities to benefit from buoyant sources of voluntary income. In terms of building capacity and independence, the best source is having a robust flow of funds so that organisations do not always have to kowtow to Government.
	The hon. Member for Staffordshire, Moorlands (Charlotte Atkins) talked about the importance of core funding and the citizens advice bureaux. When I was a member of the Public Accounts Committee, we had a hearing with the permanent secretary of the Department for Work and Pensions on the complexity of benefit forms. He pointed out that the DWP now includes the CAB national telephone number on its forms, because they require some interpretation, but of course not a single penny is paid by way of contribution to the CAB for the extra work that that causes it. It is presumptuous to rely on organisations such as the CAB that provide such useful services without reflecting that in their funding.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker) told us about the exploits in the great north run of his nine-year-old son, whom we all congratulate. My hon. Friend also mentioned the amazing sum of £403,000 that that group of people raised, which illustrates the level of commitment that there was. That is a great success story.
	My hon. Friend also talked about the importance of volunteering. It is crucial that we have sustained volunteering. Many voluntary organisations welcome one-off incidences of volunteering, but it is the people who are prepared to return week after week who are essential for maintaining services—especially young people, who can continue doing so for many years.
	My hon. Friend talked about gift aid, too. I agree that we need to end the paper chase that surrounds gift aid. It is ludicrous that in the 21st century people have physically to fill in paper forms merely to certify that they are taxpayers. There must be more efficient ways of doing that.
	The hon. Members for West Bromwich, West (Mr. Bailey) and for Caernarfon (Hywel Williams) also made speeches. The hon. Member for West Bromwich, West talked about co-operatives. He is right that we should extend our discussions so that we talk about not only charities but co-operatives and social enterprises of all descriptions.
	The hon. Member for Edinburgh, North and Leith also talked about gift aid, and I think that at the time one of the Ministers was nodding—I could not see properly because the Dispatch Box was in the way. That was a helpful sign that the representations made to the Government review of gift aid might be sympathetically received. The Institute of Fundraising and its coalition share our view that we should move to a paper-free way of allocating funds.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Rochford and Southend, East (James Duddridge) made a fluent and passionate speech, largely without notes. He discussed the use of the term "third sector". I sometimes think that that is not the best term. The term "the third world" is now thought to be rather pejorative and patronising.

Paul Truswell: Sitting through the debate this afternoon felt a little like being a passenger sitting on a train outside Leeds City station waiting for a platform to become vacant. I promise the House and my right hon. Friend the Minister that I will not expand into the time available by applying the parliamentary equivalent of Parkinson's law.
	There is an old adage that states that when Pudsey is strong, Yorkshire is strong, and when Yorkshire is strong, England is strong. It refers to cricket, but it is a good axiom for transport, as I shall try to demonstrate in this whistle-stop tour of transport issues in Pudsey constituency.
	As the vast majority of passenger transport journeys in my constituency are made by bus, I shall begin by discussing bus services. Some hon. Members, including me, have banged our heads against a brick wall for many years in arguing for bus operators and services to be made more accountable and responsive to the communities that they serve, rather than to the profit motive on which they normally operate. For years, Ministers dutifully dead-batted our demands. At the 2005 Labour party conference, however, the Secretary of State for International Development, who was then the Secretary of State for Transport, made the announcement that gave us real hope for change. That was followed by the publication of "Putting Passengers First" and of the draft Local Transport Bill.
	Deregulation has been a disaster for many communities the length and breadth of this country, which is certainly the case for several communities in my constituency. The Conservative attitude to bus services was typified by Margaret Thatcher's view that any man who depended on buses by the age of 26 should regard himself as a failure. That characterised Tory policy then and it characterises Tory policy now. It is high time for this Government to break away from that legacy.
	Since deregulation in 1985, quality and standards have undoubtedly fallen across bus services in Pudsey and West Yorkshire. Fares have increased by more than 50 per cent. in real terms, and the number of passengers in West Yorkshire has fallen by almost 40 per cent., which equates to 100 million passenger journeys. Under deregulation, bus companies can pick and choose what services they provide. Services are chopped, changed, missing or late, and passengers feel powerless. Bus operators continue to make profits, even when they are providing a poor service.
	Links to facilities such as health centres, post offices, shopping centres, schools, colleges and recreational facilities are often inadequate or non-existent, because the operator has no interest in meeting that public need and is only interested in making a profit. Passengers turn to their MPs, councillors or the passenger transport executive, which is Metro in West Yorkshire, only to discover our individual and collective impotence. That is why we need greater powers locally to give communities a better deal.
	In areas such as mine, deregulation has been a failure, even on its own terms. There is no real competition, no passenger choice and no way of discerning value for money for the taxpayer, where services are put out to tender by the PTE. PTEs, such as Metro in West Yorkshire, currently subsidise about 13 per cent. of services. It is impossible to gauge whether the taxpayer is getting value for money in a monopoly situation in which only one company tenders for each contract. My area, like many others, has been subject to a plethora of service changes, which has led to a concentration of resources on profitable routes and a move away from unprofitable but socially desirable services. Communities such as Hough Side in Pudsey and Fairfield estate in Farsley have been cut out of the service network without notice, leaving many residents, especially older people, stranded. Links to important shopping centres such as Pudsey and the Owlcotes centre have been reduced or cut altogether.
	In the not-too-distant past, disruptive changes were made to services such as the Nos. 97, 647 and 651 in the Guiseley and Yeadon areas in my constituency. There are no public transport links from my constituency to the recently rebuilt Wharfedale hospital in Otley, which provides my constituents with key services, or to the nearby treatment centre at Eccleshill in Bradford. That causes real hardship to my constituents who do not have ready access to alternative forms of transport.
	Services have effectively been slimmed down to a profitable core. Routes such as the cross-city No. 4 between Pudsey and Whinmoor are often quoted as a success of the deregulated system. An ftr bus has been introduced through a partnership between First Bus, which is the operator, Metro, which is the PTE, and Leeds city council. Investment in the service, which is welcome, includes bus priorities, stop and shelter upgrades, real-time information displays and traffic light priorities for buses. All that is excellent as far as it goes, but such showcase routes cannot hide the decline of services such as those that I have mentioned.
	Within the overall picture of decline, there was—as my right hon. Friend the Minister may mention—a small overall growth in bus patronage in West Yorkshire in 2006-07. However, that was due entirely to the very welcome introduction of free concessionary travel; unfortunately, adult and child concession journeys declined, and I think that there is a connection between the two.
	Declining bus services affect everyone, regular bus users or not. The deterioration of services encourages increased car use, and that creates even more congestion and pollution, as well as road safety hazards such as speeding and rat-running. On carbon emissions, we know from research carried out by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research that, per passenger mile, coach and bus travel produces only 30 per cent. of the carbon dioxide created by petrol-fuelled cars and only 40 per cent. of that created by diesels. The plea is that the new draft Local Transport Bill must not become another false dawn, such as when quality contracts were introduced under the Transport Act 2000.
	Those who, like me, have been campaigning on such issues for many years welcome the replacement of the "only practicable way" test. However, concerns are already being expressed about the proposed new process. We do not want an insuperable legal high jump—the situation at the moment—to be replaced by an interminable bureaucratic marathon, nor do we want a period of instability and uncertainty to be created by unnecessary tinkering with structures such as the PTEs. I am pleased that that issue is not being pursued as was originally feared in places such as West Yorkshire.
	There is a clear difference of opinion between the Passenger Transport Executive Group, or pteg, of which I am an active member—I declare that interest, although I do not think I need to—and Ministers about the time scale for introducing a quality contract. Passenger transport authorities and PTEs may have to negotiate with civil servants, especially as part of the quality contract process involves Government funding. There may then be intervention by the traffic commissioners and an appeal to the transport tribunal—and almost inevitably, given that bus operators will fight quality contracts to the last ditch, a judicial review.
	We believe that the local transport authority, such as Metro in my area—not the unaccountable traffic commissioners and transport tribunals—should determine whether a quality contract goes ahead. If the Government insist on a role for traffic commissioners, that should be to ensure that the PTEs have carried out the process properly, rather than to determine the merits of the case.
	Stronger arrangements to protect passengers and staff also need to be put in place to cover the transitional period between an incumbent operator losing a franchise competition and a new franchise beginning. Obviously, that includes issues such as the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 1981 for bus staff and the traffic commissioners having the powers to prevent the incumbent operator from withdrawing from the market in a way that causes undue disruption for passengers and further costs for the PTE.
	Rail has a major role to play in my constituency, which is served by three stations and three lines. West Yorkshire, and my constituency in particular, were badly affected by the disastrous way in which railways were privatised. The first act of the original franchisee in our area, MTL, was to shed 70 or 80 drivers. The result, of course, was the chaos of constantly cancelled services.
	However, to be fair, rail services across the Leeds city region have been a major success story in recent years. Rail use in West Yorkshire has increased by 54 per cent. in the past 10 years and peak patronage into Leeds has doubled over that period. Between 7.30 am and 9 am, more than 90 per cent. of trains have standing passengers; unfortunately, some trains carry up to 200 per cent. of seated capacity. Given the success of the rail service in West Yorkshire, we have to cope with that sort of "sardine" syndrome; that is why I want to raise the importance of increasing capacity in our local network sooner rather than later. The pressures that I described have been reflected acutely in some of the routes across my constituency.
	The significant role of rail is demonstrated by the fact that since 2000 its modal share of peak traffic into Leeds has increased to 15 per cent., while bus modal share has declined slightly to 24.4 per cent. Interestingly, car mode share has declined to 56 per cent., largely as a result of increased rail use. On the question of carbon emissions, we know from research by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research that per passenger mile rail travel produces only 40 per cent. as much CO2 as petrol-fuelled cars and only 50 per cent. as much as cars fuelled by diesel.
	Under this Government, there have been numerous examples of tangible improvements in my constituency in terms of rail services. As I said, my constituency is served by three stations: Horsforth on the Harrogate line, New Pudsey on the Caldervale line, and Guiseley on the Airedale and Wharfedale line. All three stations have undergone refurbishment and renewal, though capacity issues and parking problems remain associated with each of them. The efficiency of Leeds City station has been increased with a £250 million investment to reduce congestion and delays. I have to say, as a regular rail user myself, that we used to spend about a third of the journey waiting outside the station for a platform to become vacant. That has now more or less disappeared as a passenger experience.
	In terms of rolling stock, we have seen the introduction of the excellent new 333 class rolling stock on the Airedale and Wharfedale line, half of which were funded by a rail passenger partnership grant that I fondly remember lobbying Ministers about. Those excellent vehicles replaced 40-year-old slam-door cast-offs from the south-eastern commuter belt. I remember some years ago a guard showing me into his little office in the rear of one of those trains and pointing out a sign saying, "In the event of emergency the nearest accident and emergency unit is Romford General", which is more than 200 miles away from any of the stations that the carriages then served. I am delighted by the success of our recent negotiations with the Department for Transport, which enabled these carriages, originally funded on a short-term basis by the RPP grant, to be retained. I thank the Minister and her Department for that assistance.
	Last year, Metro, West Yorkshire's passenger transport executive, worked with Yorkshire Forward and Northern Rail, the operators, on a £20 million partnership to add 12 carriages to the local train network. That included extra capacity on two of the lines through my constituency—the Caldervale and Harrogate lines. That was most welcome. However, one problem is that we are constantly running just to stand still in terms of meeting the huge demand in Leeds for extended capacity in our local rail services.
	Pressure has rightly been put on local developers, particularly of major developments, to make a contribution towards the rail infrastructure. For example, the developer of the former Kirkstall Forge site, which is just outside my constituency but will have a major impact on it, is to make a £4 million contribution towards the delivery of a new rail station on that site and towards additional rail capacity. Part of the package should also help to fund the opening of a further station at Apperley Bridge, which is, again, just on the perimeter of my constituency but will be used by my constituents if and when it materialises. Metro is also in discussions with Leeds city council and developers about a proposed development at Horsforth Woodside—another major development where a public transport injection from the developer is essential if it is to be regarded as remotely sustainable.
	Some parts of my constituency have seen substantial additional house building on brownfield sites. We have frequent arguments about the sustainability and density of such developments. Planners seem to base their interpretation of planning guidance, such as the former planning policy guidance note 3 on housing, on the idea that the simple existence of a railway station gives the capacity to deal with the larger number of residents generated by a major housing development. I have tried to make it clear that that could not be further from the truth.
	It is often impractical to build new stations or enhance park and ride, even where we know that huge demand exists and there would be tremendous take-up, simply because there is insufficient capacity on the network to carry the additional passenger numbers that would be generated. That clearly nonsensical paradox must be addressed if we are to get people out of their cars, and that is why increased capacity is absolutely crucial in my area and many others. The rail White Paper's proposal to deploy 1,300 extra carriages nationally and its recognition that a proportion of those should be used to address overcrowding in places such as Leeds is therefore extremely welcome.
	Metro has calculated that 100 carriages are required to address the current levels of overcrowding and the future predicted growth in the Leeds city region. That need is endorsed by the DFT's own statements in the regional planning assessment for Yorkshire and Humberside. The DFT growth forecasts for west Yorkshire by 2016 range from 22 to 55 per cent. and the DFT has acknowledged that the growth is likely to be at the higher end.
	I urge my right hon. Friend the Minister to ensure that the maximum number of carriages possible are deployed in my area, in Leeds and in west Yorkshire at the earliest opportunity. It is also important that the cost of providing this new rolling stock does not fall disproportionately on passenger fares, resulting in hikes. People have a fear about that. We ideally need new rolling stock that is more suitable than the old Sprinters and Pacers operating on the Harrogate and Caldervale lines, although the pragmatists among us accept that in the short term cascaded stock might be appropriate to bring quick improvements, provided there is a plan to replace them in due course with more up-to-date rolling stock. It is also crucial that the more ambitious proposals in the Leeds city region transport vision, such as the introduction of tram-train on the Harrogate and Leeds-Bradford airport lines and further electrification, are kept on the agenda.
	Briefly, on the airport, the five west Yorkshire councils that owned it recently sold it off. They said that that was done to give it access to private capital to promote its growth. Paradoxically, to say the least, that came out of the mouths of some people who had condemned the predictions for its growth when the White Paper on air travel was published. Regrettably, none of the £150 million proceeds of this sale are to be invested in addressing the present and future impact of the airport's operation on local communities. The money could have been used to make a contribution to creating some of the passenger transport links, especially the rail ones, to which I referred a few moments ago.
	In the light of what I have said, it will come as no surprise to the Minister that I wish to make a plea, as one always does on such occasions, for the funding of Yorkshire and Humberside, and therefore of west Yorkshire, Leeds and Pudsey—not necessarily in that order—to be addressed. I am sure that as a Yorkshire MP, she will be only too familiar with the arguments that are waged between us as politicians, and with local authorities, with organisations such as Yorkshire Forward and, last but not least, with the media.
	In the past 20 years, Leeds has created more jobs than any other major city apart from London. Between 1981 and 2002, it added 86,000 new jobs to its work force and it is expected to provide approximately 46 per cent. of the region's additional 60,000 jobs between 2004 and 2014. Although jobs have been created in Leeds, they are being taken up by the increasing number of people living outside the Leeds city boundary. Between 1991 and 2001, the number of people commuting to Leeds increased by 38 per cent. Many of those people travel though my constituency. It is clear that unless we obtain more investment in public transport, the combination of traffic congestion and a public transport network that cannot cope with the number of passengers using it will begin to choke our communities and strangle economic growth in cities such as Leeds and other parts of the West Yorkshire PTE area.
	One of the most significant concerns is the fact that spending per head on transport in Yorkshire and Humber, despite welcome and substantial increases under this Government, still compares unfavourably with the rest of the country. In Yorkshire and Humber, spending on transport in 2001 was £117 per head. In 2006-07, the Government spent £215 per person in Yorkshire and Humberside, which although it was a significant increase was much lower than the England average of £305 per capita. In 2007-08, west Yorkshire received the second lowest per capita local transport plan allocation of the six passenger transport authority areas.
	The regional transport board has advised the Government that for the period up to 2015-16 the Leeds city region should receive £140 million, which represents less than 20 per cent. of the overall funding for Yorkshire and Humberside. I appreciate that that has since increased, with the allocation of £150 million for the trolley bus scheme to replace the supertram, but the overall amount is still substantially lower than the 60 per cent. share that would reflect the Leeds city region's population or contribution to employment and gross value added in the region.
	A higher transport spend per head would allow West Yorkshire Metro, for example, to provide the Leeds city region with a model for an efficient public transport network that would underpin the sustainable development of the city region's economy. Sustained and significant investment will build on the excellent, but often isolated and limited, examples of successful good practice, some of which I have mentioned as resulting from Government funding and policy. Investment in roads would allow the upgrading and improvement of the Leeds and Bradford ring road, part of which runs through my constituency, and allow other key routes between towns and cities to remove some obvious bottlenecks and pressure points.
	All that I have said so far boils down to three key messages. The first is that we require real and practical local powers to deliver bus services that meet the needs of passengers. Secondly, we need significant increases in rail capacity to address overcrowding and predicted growth in demand. Last, but not least, we need a much fairer funding deal for the region, from which my constituency and my city would undoubtedly benefit. I hope that my right hon. Friend can satisfy me to some substantive degree on each of those points.

Rosie Winterton: Secondly, local transport funding for Yorkshire and Humber has more than doubled in the last seven years, from £75 million in 2000-01 to £156 million in 2007-08. Thirdly, in July 2006, we announced plans to fund 31 major road and public transport schemes in Yorkshire and the Humber from the £927 million provisionally allocated over the next 10 years in response to regional advice about priorities in the region.
	It is also true that a wide range of factors are taken into account when determining how funding is to be distributed, including the needs of different areas and where investment might have recently been made. It is difficult to make a direct comparison between expenditure in each region. The needs of different areas can depend, for example, on issues such as the length of the strategic road network there, or the amount of support that train operating companies in the region require. It is also important that we in the north recognise that expenditure on national infrastructure, such as motorways and strategic networks that feed into the region, can benefit us as well, even if they are in another region.
	My hon. Friend spoke of the Leeds city region development plan vision for transport, which aims to ensure that transport serves the people in the city region, connects people to jobs, education, training, retail and leisure facilities, and connects the city region to others in the UK. The transport vision is a £4.5 billion programme of improvements over 25 years. The city region partners are involved in further work and, I am glad to say, my officials have regular meetings with them to help them to establish deliverable short, medium and long-term priorities. Of course, it is for the city region partners to identify suitable funding in order to deliver their vision, but we are giving central support to work with them.
	I was pleased to see that my hon. Friend mentioned a number of improvements to transport in his constituency. It is true that changes are happening on the buses. Bus patronage in west Yorkshire has been broadly static over the last five years at around 200 million trips per year, but Metro has set an ambitious growth target for 2010-11 of 210 million trips per year. I know that Metro's partnership investment in free city bus services for Leeds and Wakefield has been extremely popular and well received. Design work is nearing completion on a significant quality bus corridor on the A65 Kirkstall road in Leeds. A new bus lane and associated bus priority measures will help to cut bus journey times by up to 6 minutes, and will also address congestion on one of the busiest radial routes into Leeds.
	Planning work is well advanced on a new £3 million town centre bus station in Pudsey. That will add another high quality facility to the growing number of modern, award-winning West Yorkshire bus stations. I am told that the new building is eye-catching. That, together with improvements to traffic flow on Church lane, will enhance Pudsey town centre, and provide passengers with an improved, comfortable and enclosed waiting environment with 24-hour, monitored CCTV coverage and real-time departure information. All that genuinely contributes to people getting on buses. Comfort, safety, security and information matter.
	My hon. Friend mentioned the FTR bus, which is an example of the new public transport concept of bus rapid transit. That was introduced in partnership with FirstGroup, and involves futuristic FTR buses and improvements to the highway. Route 4, between Pudsey and Whinmoor via the city square, was one of the first to benefit from that new technology. The Department is working with Leeds and Metro to develop a wider high-quality bus rapid transit scheme for the city, involving complementary measures such as park and ride.
	My hon. Friend mentioned the draft Local Transport Bill. Although the historic decline in bus patronage is levelling off, more needs to be done. Government investment in bus services has increased to £2.5 billion per year compared with £1 billion a decade ago, but more remains to be done. Bus services work best where there are good relations between bus operators and local authorities, and each is prepared to invest—the local authority in better infrastructure and the operators in better vehicles. If we can be confident that each side is playing its part, that can make a difference.
	The draft Bill provides more opportunities for quality partnerships, allowing them to specify minimum frequencies and maximum fares, which my hon. Friend mentioned. The operators would have to be willing partners in all that, but we are strengthening the local authorities' negotiating hand. The draft Bill also includes provisions to tackle problems of poor punctuality. Again, the local authorities and the operators need to act in harmony on that. Such matters really matter to passengers, and they want enforcement if local authorities are not doing their bit about bus lanes in the same way as they want operators to play their part.
	The point of my hon. Friend's private Member's Bill two and a half years ago was to deal with quality contract schemes. The draft Bill makes such schemes, when they are in the public interest, a more realistic option for local authorities. As my hon. Friend said, it would replace the "only practicable way" test, which local authorities said was unrealistically high. The proposal has been welcomed by local authorities. I assure my hon. Friend that the idea of having an approval board for the Secretary of State is not to put unnecessary hurdles in the way but to allow greater certainty that the quality contracts can go ahead without other problems entering the arena.
	The draft Bill also sets out proposals to restructure the way in which transport is delivered in communities. It would allow for the reform of transport governance arrangements in existing areas as well as the establishment of new passenger transport authorities and changes to the boundaries of existing PTA areas. I know that the West Yorkshire PTA is actively considering that with interest.
	My hon. Friend referred to rail, and made an important point about it. As he said, our White Paper on rail will include buying an additional 1,300 new carriages, over 300 of which will address rapid growth in demand in cities, including Leeds. We are going to produce a plan for the distribution of the rolling stock by January 2008. As my hon. Friend said, we announced that additional capacity would be provided to accommodate peak demand of more than 35 per cent. in the Leeds journey-to-work area by 2014. Additional capacity will be provided by lengthening trains operated by TransPennine Express. Journey times between Liverpool and Manchester will be reduced to 40 minutes and fast services between Manchester and Leeds cut to 43 minutes.
	I hope that my hon. Friend was pleased by the announcement that I made last week about the feasibility study of the Manchester hub, which has important implications for the Northern Way, which is looking at how we support economic growth in the three northern regions. That will obviously have a big effect on the Leeds area, where the feasibility study will consider how to deliver increased capacity and improved reliability.
	I hope that I have been able to outline the Government's ambitious agenda for improving transport in Pudsey and west Yorkshire, as well as in the rest of the country. That agenda includes providing improved access to jobs and services. We have invested in transport and we will continue to invest in transport. We will continue to tackle congestion and we will continue to work to provide high-quality public transport for all. My hon. Friend has campaigned tirelessly on the issue. I hope that what I have said today will give him some reassurance about our plans for the future, particularly the draft Local Transport Bill, which I believe will make a real difference to local transport.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Adjourned accordingly at twelve minutes past Six o'clock.